Gabor Boritt

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Gabor Boritt (born 1940 in Budapest, Hungary) is the Robert Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies and Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. Born in World War II Hungary, he participated as a teenager in the 1956 revolution against the Soviet Union. He escaped to the United States, where he received his higher education and became one of the finest Lincoln scholars. His life story is soon to be the subject of a feature-length documentary film titled Budapest to Gettysburg. He is the author, co-author, or editor of sixteen books about Lincoln and the Civil War. Boritt and his wife live on a farm near the Gettysburg battlefield, where they have raised their three sons.

His latest book The Gettysburg Gospel: The Lincoln Speech Nobody Knows was featured on the cover of U.S. News and World Report and called "fascinating" by the New York Times.[citation needed]

Boritt was born in Budapest, Hungary, at the start of World War II. The Nazis forced his family to live in a single room in a hospital on the ghetto’s edge. Here he played upon bloodstained floors. As his father helped lead resistance against the Nazis, his grandfather’s family was deported from the countryside and murdered in Auschwitz. By the end of the war, Budapest was in ruins and Hungary in Stalin’s grip. In the years that followed, Boritt’s mother died, his father and brother were imprisoned, and he was sent to an orphanage. In 1956, sixteen-year-old Boritt joined the Hungarian Revolution. He remembers the initial euphoria, “We thought it was a whole new world. Anything was possible.” Days later, 3,000 Soviet tanks crushed those possibilities. Boritt and his sister Judith headed for the Austrian border. In darkness, they hiked through wooded hills. They came to a no-man’s-land guarded by watchtowers with machine guns. Freedom lay on the other side. Together, they started running.[citation needed]

After months at an Austrian refugee camp, Boritt came to America, with one dollar in his pocket. He arrived in the “dirtiest city” he had ever seen: New York. Told that America is “out west,” Boritt headed to South Dakota.[citation needed] He wanted to learn English, and picked up a free booklet of Abraham Lincoln’s writings. Captivated by Lincoln’s mastery of the language rise from poverty to the presidency, Boritt began studying American history and earned his bachelor of arts degree from Yankton College in 1962 and earned his Masters degree from the University of South Dakota the following year. Boritt earned a Ph.D. from Boston University in 1968. As an immigrant, he felt obliged to go to Vietnam, where he taught soldiers about the American Civil War. In 1978, he published his first book, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream. A 1995 survey of leading experts by The Civil War Times lists it as one of the ten most important books ever written about the 16th President. It placed at the center of Lincoln’s outlook what Boritt called “the right to rise.”[citation needed]

In 1981, he came to Gettysburg College. He founded the prestigious Civil War Institute and the school created for him the nation’s first fully funded chair for the study of the Civil War. He helped create the $50,000 Lincoln Prize, widely considered the most coveted award for the study of American history. He also helped create the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, which is rapidly becoming a leader in improving the teaching of history in schools.

Today, Gabor Boritt serves on the boards of the Gettysburg National Battlefield Museum Foundation and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, appointed by Congress. And he continues teaching.

Together with his wife Liz, he raised three sons. They live in an 18th-century farmhouse on the edge of the battlefield which they restored with their own hands. It served as both a stop on the Underground Railroad and as a Confederate hospital.

[edit] External links

The creator of this article, or someone who has substantially contributed to it, may have a conflict of interest regarding its subject matter.
It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view.
Please discuss further on the talk page.
This article has been tagged since March 2007.
This article is orphaned as few or no other articles link to it.
Please help introduce links in articles on related topics. (March 2007)
This article or section needs sources or references that appear in reliable, third-party publications.
Primary sources and sources affiliated with the subject of the article are generally not sufficient for a Wikipedia article. Please include more appropriate citations from reliable sources, or discuss the issue on the talk page.
This article has been tagged since March 2007.